Two weeks ago Marcos and I were blessed with a 2nd beautiful little girl. Eva was born at 8:18 am on March 11th by Caesarean section. She looks VERY much like Ariana did at birth, only a little bigger with more hair! She is such a good baby, though it is quite an adjustment getting used to the constant feeds again!

At the moment, my whole day seems to revolve around Eva's feeds. With Ariana, we were encouraged by about day 3 to "top her up" with a bottle as she didn't appear to be feeding much because she was jaundiced - well, that's what I believed at the time. Now I know that I should have just persevered with breast-feeding her when she was hungry, but in any case, Ariana got used to a bottle, and it made a huge difference in terms of how long (and how often) she fed. I could pretty much set my clock to Ariana feeding every 3 hours, and during the night Marcos and I took it in turns to bottle feed her, though I always offered her the breast first. Ariana weaned herself off me at about 3 1/2 months, so bottle feeding her solely after that was reasonably quick.

On the very first night in hospital, with Eva wanting to feed pretty much constantly, one of the nurses asked if I wanted to give her a bottle, but being better informed about breast feeding this time (I had bought and read the Australian Breastfeeding Association's book "Breast feeding ... naturally") I refused the bottle and persevered with just breast feeding. A few family members are trying to encourage me to introduce Eva to a bottle, for "convenience", but I want to keep with it, even if it means I spend a very, very large amount of my time just feeding Eva!

I am finding it a little difficult not really getting any time to myself to be able to sit down and concentrate on things, like work or studies, like I could with Ariana, but I guess it is still very early days... I am only managing to get a few things organised at home every day right now, especially as Ariana has been unwell and I have had a lot of extra washing as a result. I feel extremely domestic right now!! I had hoped to be able to start doing some work soon as we could do with the money, but that looks unlikely to happen for a few more weeks at least, at this rate. We'll just have to wait and see how things pan out...